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Musings about the virtual and the real world

CSM delegate Noobman and member of the most powerful wormhole alliance in the game kindly organized a townhall to update the wormhole community and ask a few questions. For my remaining two readers I provide a heavily biased summary below.

The full recording is here, at 2h, its manageable, there is so much repetition and group hugs (circle*** for some) that one can easily fast forward. Actual content maybe 10 minutes.

tl/dr Townhall meeting (real life or game) give the floor to those who take it and in general those are the ones with the most aggressive agenda. Extremism will always win in a debate as categorical statements are easier to digest and remember. There is no fighting it and hence I rarely, if ever participate in these events. Basically, the townhall confirmed what we all expected, Noobman and his friends in C5/C6 space have nothing to do with the wormhole space that I experience. Large-fleet, capital supported evictions, dozens of farming holes to make money, PvE as the necessary evil are literally a different game from mine. My purpose in their world is to be “content”, i.e. I serve the role as dumb prey. To that end, they want me to live in Wormhole space and throw me a few bones so that it becomes worth it. And when I get too visible, it should be easy to evict me. Actually, this is fine by me. I like gnawing on bones.

Here are some cliffnotes. Sorry if I missed anything, I tuned out a few times when the echo chamber reverberated too much. My comments in italics.

Apparently, CCP has not forgotten about wormholes and fact many (shitloads) of CCP devs reside in low class wormhole space. Guess even CCP devs need PI.

Noobman asked how the T3C changes had affected wormholers and the audience collectively went into EFT/Pyfa mode, started extolling the virtues of one ship over the other. Consensus emerged after a few minutes:

Proteus, Tengu and Legion are useless. Loki is the only T3C worth flying.

The halving of their tank and an increase in signature and DPS means that their role has changed from heavy tackle with staying power to tackle that needs a serious fleet to bail them out.

The whole point that T3Cs are more flexible is irrelevant. Anyone basing out of a citadel has the ability to re-fit or take a specialized ship.

I had always flown a Proteus in “bulldog” mode, holding on to the target and tried to kill it with my other character. I think these days are over. I have an active-tank fit with good DPS but it is very sensitive to neuting (and has no cap injector). I expect to move to Stratios soon. At least I won’t lose SP when it dies.

Scanning changes

We like it. A few glitches but overall its an improvement. Took CCP 3 (?) fixes but its workable now.

Big discussion on spawn times of anomalies and signatures.

I was surprised about how much HK and the rest of audience cared about PvE sites but its obvious, each chest-beating PvP player has a private farming hole where they run sites to make money.

The spawn rates of anomalies apparently is “class wide”, i.e. a site only spawns if another dies in a same class Wormhole. With many, many holes being abandoned and accumulating sites (see my discussion about our C2 when we moved in), active holes are empty. The audience wanted a timer on each site that a newly spawned site despawns after a few days with a chance to conveniently respawn within the safety of their farming hole. Basically, they want Nullsec mechanics

Suggestion that sleeper should scram more so that Player battleships can’t use their microjump drive to escape from PvP.

The consensus was its too hard to find idiots like myself to kill. We are called “content” and we are tolerated in WH space for this purpose only. It should not be so hard to find, tackle and kill us.

CCP is considering that change to add more scrams into sleeper sites.

Drone aggro

Apparently there is a bug that sleepers attack Drones more than they should.

I have not seen it but if I had seen it I would have assumed that it was a new mechanic. For C2, I stopped using Gallente drone ships and went back to Caldari since drone micromanagement was just too tedious. If this had been intentional, I would have not cared. Sleepers are smarter NPC, so why wouldn’t they shoot at drones?

I assume this mechanic eats into the AFK money making of their farming holes so it has to get fixed.

Drifters. They are the Battleship-sized sleepers that infest C5 and C6 space when you kill a structure. They are hard to kill, persist and attack citadels. (and can be killed with a citadel).

Consensus seemed to be that they should spawn if you have a Capital ship on grid or shooting the structure. This of course removes them as a game mechanic to teams like ours coming with Battleships from a C4 and kill them because (gasp!) its a fun game mechanic but this is obviously of no importance. ISK/hour is the only thing that counts

The idea behind it is of course that the hardcore PvP-ers want more capital ships flown by incompetent fools in sites where they can be tackled.

Industry and moons mining.

CCP is thinking about it. Come back in 2018 maybe.

Smaller temporary structures to help evictions.

Without POS, eviction teams don’t have a safe space to log off. This makes evictions too hard and the suggestion was to develop a new structure that has a docking ring or something

I personally wanted a smaller structure for temporary wormhole camping trips and if it is making evictions easier, so be it. If anyone wants to evict me, they can do it anyway so what do I care what they need to bring?

Some conversation on using capital ships, cap chargers, dreads etc. I lost track what the discussion was about.

Its been 3 weeks since my last post and by now my hopes of attracting a 3rd reader are likely dashed. I don’t think I will be space famous any time soon.

Well, to be honest, I haven’t been all that active in EVE for a variety of reasons. none have to do with the game itself. Its just life, I am somehow experiencing a chain of “little things” that together keep me busy.

In EVE, I am shuttling between our home C4 with our “real” crew and our new C2 which we will use as a hunting blind when things are slow in C4 land. One of the issues we encountered in our C4 is that we either find nobody, we find a single exploration frigate (though these kills cost me since I tend to send more money to the victim than they lost) or we are “found” by a 20 + man gang who could wipe the floor with us when they sneeze. Not ideal currently and while we all hope that people resettle wormhole space in the fall, my concern is that the emphasis on nullsec has damaged our life style. Nullsec promises unlimited ISK making potential, scheduled fights with known neighbors and of course with no risk at all to the line pilot due to generous reimbursement programs. All for no work whatsoever. Continue reading →

As the majority of my two handsome and intelligent readers may remember, I have been bumming around EVE for many years but my true love is Wormhole space. It all started in 2009 when I was a nawt but a podpole flying in one of those high-sec corporations that people read about. You know, the ones that get wardeced constantly, awoxed and are the buttjoke of EVE. Yep. That was me. Anyway. My friend Oreamnos and I decided we had it and applied together to Z3r0 Return Mining of Jadecougar’s fame (lost in EVE, used to be one of the better podcasts). At that time we owned “Fred”, a lovely C2 hole with a low sec and a C2 static. I.e. easy to get in, easy to find people and not so easy (albeit not impossible at all) to get evicted from. Many adventures happened in and around Fred and my old tales all start here. But as Z3r0 grew up, we moved into “Shirley” (C4 with a static C4. Puke) and then into our current home “Tim”, also a C4. “Fred” stayed in the alliance for a while, first as an academy for new pilots and then later as a general hole. But all good things must come to an end, Fred was abandoned when our last permanent residents fizzled out. As it is in Wormhole life, the connections closed and Fred floated away like a soap bubble into the sunset during a hurricane in the desert on Mars, never to be seen again.

Until last week…. Here follows the account of the great Settlement of Fred. Continue reading →

May my remaining two readers forgive the break in communication, I actually took a few days off to travel, take photos and ponder. Its been an interesting summer so far, full of real-life changes and adjustments and it looks like to shape up as a year that I won’t forget soon.

In EVE, when I go exploring, most of my time is spent on scanning empty space. Its now a little routine but I do query why I bother, other than the occasional T1 exploration frigate I virtually never see anyone I can tackle. By evolution, the remaining wormholers in EVE have become smarter (shedding the dumb ones into nullsec, I presume) and ratters either crush their connection for safety or rat in doctrines that my 2-character team can not attack. And thus grow my plans to do something different in EVE. Maybe PvE? I know curiously little about PvE in WH space. Continue reading →

I tend to abstain from EVE drama for the same reason that I abstain from real life politics, it rarely affects me and if so, I can’t do anything about it anyway. But I feel compelled to add my voice to the chorus of screamers, may my two remaining loyal and intelligent readers forgive me. I’ll be quick.

So, background, this week, CCP announced several changes to carrier and Rorqual income generation that collectively aims to reduce income from NPC (carriers) and mining (Rorqs) significantly. The only relevant forum for EVE players – r/eve is writhing in spastic convulsions, unsubbing en-masse and shooting monuments. EVE is dying, dead and buried, a decaying corpse, Gevlon was right etc etc. Continue reading →

What follows is a cautionary tale that I want to impart to my remaining two readers. It is a tale that starts with hubris, goes through stages of boredom, distraction and inattention and ends with a dead ship. My dead ship.

But lets start at the beginning, a typical night in our small wormhole corporation had started with copious amount of scanning, Teamspeak banter and much hilarity. The map is broad and wide and as usual has nobody in it. Well, except for a group that is sitting in their force field (yes, POS-es are still a thing in WH space). Its a nice C2 with a high sec static and we try to coerce our hosts into doing something, anything by baiting with a harmless Imicus hacking their sites. No dice, the locals are not moving and our Imicus pilot is pulling 80mil ISK out of the site. Opp success? Anyway, we are not going anywhere with this baiting tactic and more exotic measures to provoke a reaction are being considered, including rolling holes, shooting the POCO or the POS, running their sites etc. The majority of our corp is based in the UK and I have to tap out for a bit for real life things. Continue reading →

The May release has dropped and for virtually everyone outside of Delve nothing has changed. In Delve some NPC raid content is happening and just like all PvE content in history of gaming, everyone expects it to be “on farm” within a few days. But hey, I don’t live in nullsec, so I don’t expect anything new to happen until at least winter 2018.

Back to the topic. With the publication of the roadmap out of the way, the EVE community ceased to focus on hypothetical and large scale solutions and hones in on features in the game that could be improved in order to make the game more playable and appealing. Upfront at the moment is the War Dec system that allows a corporation to initiate a time period where legal conflict is allowed between them and another corporation or alliance. The target does not have to agree and hence the term “non-consensual PvP” is used. Generally, the receiving corporation laments that their gameplay is now effectively stopped while the aggressor finds ways to maximize his return by wardeccing multiple helpless targets and selectively culling the dumb ones. For the vast majority of EVE players, wardecs are useless at best and a nuisance at worst; virtually nobody sees the current system as adding satisfying content to their gameplay. Continue reading →